


An Interlude From My Kitchen

by TrillianSwan



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Bi-Erasure, Breaking the Fourth Wall, M/M, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-05 20:40:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20279485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrillianSwan/pseuds/TrillianSwan
Summary: I wash the dishes.





	An Interlude From My Kitchen

**Author's Note:**

> Eliot had to break the fourth wall to help me un-write his bi-erasure with Quentin. 
> 
> Written after the chapter "Boys and Girls, Part 1" of _Tell Mama._ but I don't think it's necessary to have read that, or to read this to get _TM,_ it's just some behind-the-scenes of the writing.

“You’re telling it wrong,” Eliot says.

I’m washing dishes and Eliot is sitting on a stool in my kitchen. He’s drinking tea from a teacup and saucer my mom gave me from her dishes. I hate them. They’ve got birds and Edwardian poetry on them. I liked the ones they had before, the white ones with the brown pottery speckles. These were probably a lot more expensive. But we didn’t have a proper teacup and my teenage son decided he wanted to drink proper tea. We spoil him.

“Fuck off, Eliot, I’m taking a break,” I say, and I gesture to the house, “look at this place. All I do now is tell your story. Or read other people’s versions of your story. I can’t even follow the news, now, and I was a junkie for that.” I stop to scrub a particularly stuck piece of food from a fork. “I miss Nicole Wallace and her ‘favorite reporters and friends’.”

Eliot is older now, a little thicker around the middle, and bespectacled. The hands that hold the cup are still graceful but more weathered. No manicures or expensive lotions in the Mosaic timeline. 

“But a lot of fucking tiles,” he sighs, and holds a hand out to inspect it. He can hear my thoughts, of course, because he isn’t really here. Just my unbelievably overcranked imagination, that can’t let go of these men, manifesting them everywhere. I’m pretty sure Quentin is on my bed, reading.

“I’m not saying it’s your fault, Trillian,” the Eliot in my kitchen says to me. “They backed you into a corner. The idea, really, that a man like _ me _has broken gaydar is truly insulting. Or that I didn’t really know my best friend. Of course I knew.”

“Oh, ho,” I scoff, “Don’t be too sure. You saw my chapter on bi-erasure--”

“Yes, Trill, I fucking _ lived _it, thank you very much. Hope you got your rocks off.” His eyes narrow. He flicks his cigarette that never burns down, and the ashes disappear into the air.

“I’m sorry, El, really. Ari… got away from me. Or was me. I was a little angry with you, with… society, I guess.” I forgot to put on an apron again, and I’m getting doused with my patented go-banshee-on-the-dishes technique.

“And the writers. Trillian, really, I don’t know why we’re fighting.” He brushes his curls out of his face.

“You appeared in my kitchen and pronounced I was writing it wrong!” I wave my bottle brush in the air at him. 

“Okay, look, Trill, calm down.” He’s talking to me like he talks to Quentin sometimes. Jesus, even my imaginary friends think I’m crazy. He sets down his teacup on the counter and no longer has a cigarette. He comes to stand behind me and puts his hands on my shoulders. He’s only a couple of inches taller than me so his mouth is near my ear as he presses his cheek to my head. He smells good, but I can’t think of what. “You’re writing two chapters at the same time. You go back and forth, chipping away at each one. I’m with Ari, on a rock smoking pot and trying to talk to her, and then I’m using telekinesis to get Q’s pants off, it’s confusing, for you and for me.”

“I know, I-- it’s just that I never wrote anything of your time together, anything I can have you flash back to, or anything that I can just reread with your eyes and see in a new way, and feel how you process that.”

“So you started with the anniversary.”

“Yes, I never intended to write smut, other people do that better than me, but I needed to know how it was, the patterns you established right from the start, I needed… to know what really happened. And the only way to find out was to write it. I’m not going to post it-- that’s why I’m writing the Arielle chapter, to have something to post-- but I just need to write it. And… it’s really hard,” I confess. 

He laughs and squeezes my shoulders. “Oh, honey, I completely appreciate the big dick energy you give me, the _ seething _masculinity, the control, the technique. That part you deleted, with the buttons, was particularly hot.”

“You’re quite experienced, El,” I smirk. “And you get your big dick energy from Hale, so thank him for that.”

“But you write Quentin too passive. He’s not a child.” I need to move to keep cleaning the kitchen, so now he’s back on the stool, teacup in hand. “Or rather, we both were. We were only 24 and 25, for god’s sake. I was just as scared as he was, and he was more _ forthcoming, _ shall we say, than you let on.”

“I’m just trying to somehow keep you in the dark that he wants it just as much as you do. I thought you taking control and never letting him do anything would get us there, but…”

“You’re losing Quentin.”

“Yes. And you,” I sigh.

“What if I wasn’t so blind? Why do I have to be?”

“Because they code you that way. You treat him like you can’t have him because he’s straight. Right up to turning him down, ‘that’s not you, not when you have a choice’,” I point out.

He waves his hand. “That could mean anything. He never made a move on me, not like he did with Alice, so let’s say that’s how I know he wouldn't choose me. Because he could have, a million times, but he never sought me out like that. And he was rebounding from Alice at that particular moment, I knew he would choose her if he thought he still had a chance. And it’s well established I was being a coward at the time-- a time, I might add, in which I _hadn’t_ just gone through a year of laying tiles and getting to know Q better than I ever had. That doesn’t mean I was too stupid to see he was bi.”

“Well, fuck, El. That’s not just rewriting the last chapter, or fixing it, I’ve woven this thing all through the whole work. I call it--”

“My enchantment. I know,” he sighs. “You enchanted me to not see Quentin’s bisexuality until you brought the wards down. But it’s just not--”

“--the truth,” I finish for him, and I lean against the counter, the reality sinking in.

“Yeah.” He looks down into his cup. I wish I knew what he was thinking. I think he’s disappointed in me.

Quentin appears in the kitchen doorway, leaning on the door jamb with his hands in his jeans pockets and a book tucked under his arm. “I wish you could keep some of what you’ve been writing in the anniversary scene, the stuff about how Eliot and I function as Team Queliot on _ Survivor: Mosaic _ was really working.”

“And my talk with Mama,” Eliot adds. “Even though that’s all based on the biphobic 'enchantment' falling. But it wouldn't take much to tweak that. And Q, your note to me was really sweet, thank you.”

They do this sometimes, just talk to each other in front of me like I’m not here.

“I meant it,” Quentin shrugs. “The sexuality part of it, it doesn’t matter, it’s a red herring. What we had really was a first for me. You took the time with me that no one ever had, you opened me up to explore myself, and you. You changed the game for me."

Eliot blushes, and Quentin goes to him. They’re both young again now, and the tea is gone. Eliot slips an arm around his waist. “It was a first for me, too, I’d never been with one person so long. We opened up _ together, _ Q. A team, like always.” He kisses Q on the tip of his nose, and Quentin grins, tucking his hair back behind his ear. “I’m sorry that made me panic and push you away. I still had a long way to go, then,” he says, although he looks no older than he was.

“I should be writing this down,” I say, and they look at me like they’re surprised I'm still here. 

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes when I get stuck I just write whatever to get me unstuck. I didn't think I was ever going to publish this but I'm stuck now in the middle of my next set of TM chapters and I just kept thinking about it. Maybe I should have our boys over to my kitchen again to help. :)


End file.
